As a candidate for president four years ago, Barack Obama spun an intoxicating message of hope and change. It came at a time the public was enduring a desperate deficiency of both.

Partisan gridlock appeared to have reached new heights, the economy had derailed, the nation was embroiled in two contentious wars and the horrific terrorist attacks that precipitated them had made most Americans mortally skittish.

The dire conditions played as much a role in sweeping the first black American into the White House as the candidate himself.

But like John F. Kennedy, the last first-term senator elected president before him, Obama struggled to take the reins of power effectively and deliver on his promises.

Thematically, Obama promised to heal the economy, change the hostile nature of Washington by restoring civility and restore America’s standing in the world.

Obama passed the $800 billion stimulus and an $85 billion bailout of the auto industry. But the measures functioned more as damage limitation than hardship turnaround.

The anticipated sequel to the New Deal never delivered the improvement in the nation’s infrastructure. Instead of restricting banking leaders whose avarice hastened the nation’s Great Recession, President Obama slapped them on the wrist.

And while still in the political catbird seat of having a Democrat-controlled Congress, Obama passed the sweeping health care reform law into existence, which remains unpopular with many Americans.

Polls show rising economic optimism among voters, and September’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate is the best in three years, but the nation remains economically bed-ridden. Neither Washington decorum nor international impressions have improved.

In fact, they’ve gotten worse.

The most recent Gallup Poll shows Congress’ approval rating at an all-time low of 10 percent.

View full sizeAP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, filePresident Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, speaks at the opening of his jobs summit

Internationally, a Pew Research poll found that rather than improve the nation’s tattered standing abroad, Obama has largely weakened it. Europe, Muslim countries, China and Mexico all have a lesser opinion of the United States since Obama took office.

Perhaps most noteworthy is the 9-point drop among Muslim nations, where it was believed Obama could help because his father was a Muslim.

But when Islamic tensions toward the U.S. erupted in deadly violence at U.S. embassies last month, critics say his response was listless.

“I don’t think they’ve handled it very well, and I don’t think we still have gotten our arms around it,” former Homeland Security Secretary and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge said last week.

Meanwhile, other Obama campaign promises — to end both wars, close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and invest in clean coal technology for national energy independence — effectively vanished.

“He hasn’t done much at all,” said Christine Toretti, a leading figure in the Republican National Committee and a former Indiana County mining executive. “His Environmental Protection Agency has been so anti-business.”

Despite a broad sense of disappointment in Obama at home and abroad, people who’ve done business with his administration say there is little indication that his approach will change with another term.

“He will be concerned with his legacy more than anything else,” said Ron Klink, a former Democratic Pittsburgh congressman-turned lobbyist. “We have to take his previous actions and assume that his thoughts will be the same.”

Klink said there are already indications that Obama has eyes for a NAFTA-style trans-Pacific free trade agreement that would encompass a third of the U.S. economy as his second-term legacy achievement.

But such an accord calls into question how Obama incorporates China. Wholesale copyright infringements, deceptive currency manipulation, and substandard working conditions have caused even prominent Democrats in Congress to condemn Obama for taking a passive posture with China over trade.

“Every indication I have right now starts to ring the alarm bells that this president in a second term may be doing things to weaken the intellectual creativity that has made this country great,” Klink said.

NAFTA wasn’t popular with left-leaning labor unions when President Bill Clinton pushed it in 1994. A similar, more expansive trans-Pacific agreement would be a greater affront to a traditionally loyal part of the Democratic Party base.

“Those trade deals have just made it easier for industries that chase the lowest wage to move in and out of your economy,” Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Richard Bloomingdale said. “It’s one of the things we disagreed with President Clinton about then, and it’s one of the things we disagree with President Obama about now.”

Further, Obama was virtually silent as collective bargaining battles were lost in Wisconsin and drew negative publicity in Chicago.

But instead of condemning Obama’s absence in divisive labor battles, Bloomingdale said the president has balanced his responsibilities while strengthening federal oversight of collective bargaining.

“Where the president has been able to fight for workers and a strong middle class, we’ve been pleased,” he said. “We’ve got a National Labor Relations Board for the first time in years that’s leveling the playing field and making sure workers are protected.”

And contrary to the perception that business and industry have a contentious relationship with Obama, Karen Kerrigan, president of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, said she’s been in meetings at the White House about every other month.

She said that her trade group enjoys a “cordial and open relationship” with the administration.

“We as a group have never felt like we’ve been left out,” Kerrigan said.

But she added that small-business concerns have not been heeded with the appropriate urgency.

“The issue has been taking what we give them in terms of feedback and ideas and what small businesses say they need, and the White House taking it to the Hill and getting execution,” Kerrigan said. “I don’t know that they understand or acknowledge that they need to take the next step.”

Still, there is a fair amount of optimism that Obama is up to tackling the most pressing issue ahead — the nation’s rapidly approaching fiscal cliff. A host of mandated budget cuts and tax increases are slated to automatically take effect at the end of the year.

“I see the adults getting together as we speak,” Kerrigan added, alluding to the disintegration of Obama’s relationship with Republican congressional leaders in his first term.

View full sizeAP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/2012President Barack Obama, right, talks with his former personal aide Reggie Love, left, as they attend an Olympic menâs exhibition basketball game between Brazil and Team USA.

The president signaled as much last month during a speech in Ohio.

“I’ve said if the Republicans need more love, if they want me to walk the dog or wash their car, I’m happy to do it,” Obama joked during a stop in Cincinnati.

And despite a promising relationship with House Speaker John Boehner that soured when they failed to reach a much-ballyhooed “grand bargain” for the deficit, Klink said both men should “grow up and get over it” for the good of the country.

“There was fault on both sides, but if they’re not [able to put aside their differences] neither one should be where they are,” he said. “They have to show us their best side, grow in this relationship, and be less partisan and more a patriot.”

Bloomingdale’s hope rests with seeing the GOP fiscal hawks who fought Obama’s efforts in his first term become more willing to negotiate, or that they will be replaced.

“I’m hoping that people that made the decision in 2009 during the inaugural week to fight the president every step of the way, even if it meant keeping people in poverty, I’d hope they’d put the best interests of the country before their partisan interests,” he said.

And if they don’t, “I’m hoping enough of those crazies get beat in the general election.”

It’s rare that an accomplished governor walks away from office after a productive single term, but that’s exactly what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts in 2007.

Romney, the son of progressive Republican Michigan Gov. George Romney, had his eye on the White House. But he left the governor’s office with a laudable record of accomplishment for a Republican in a notoriously liberal Democrat-controlled legislature.

The way he maneuvered that arbitrary political landscape offers some insight into how a President Romney would lead the nation.

But it’s whether Romney accomplished his Massachusetts bipartisan miracles through necessity or nature that would determine his ability to defuse Washington’s partisan strife and move the nation forward.

Romney is notoriously loyal to the people he works with — sometimes to a fault. And in his earliest days as governor, that loyalty caused transitional problems.

“He might have done better if he had not brought members of his campaign staff with him when he first became governor,” said Brian Gilmore, executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts. “It took time for them to understand who had credibility and who didn’t.”

And unlike more gregarious predecessors, Romney was more pragmatic, spending little time engaged in the traditional social intercourse of politics.

“He was pretty much all business,” Gilmore added. “Compared to some other governors who go to openings and cut ribbons, he left that work to other people. He’s not the type to be glad-handing.”

And even when hostile Democrats toned down their antagonism, they found it hard to develop a rapport with Romney.

“We had a genuine curiosity about the people in the building and what made them tick, and how to develop functional relationships that proved to be productive in the clinch,” Thomas M. Finneran, the House speaker for the first 21 months of Romney’s term, told The Boston Globe. “Romney was considerably more reserved.”

But Romney also sent early collaborative signals to hostile Democratic lawmakers, suspicious that he’d be a combative GOP firebrand. In addition to appointing loyal Republicans, Romney’s cabinet was loaded with liberals and moderates.

“As many as half the cabinet were Democrats,” said Jane Edmonds, Romney’s former Secretary of Workforce. “I think Mitt Romney actually likes people to debate and challenge and come up with ideas. I don’t think he cares where the idea is coming from so long as it’s a good one.”

If Edmonds name is familiar, it may be because she was the Democrat who spoke passionately and prominently for his candidacy at the Republican National Convention.

As a black woman, a former community activist, and a lifelong Democrat who jokes that she grew up in the “People’s Republic of Cambridge,” she’s an unlikely advocate for a Massachusetts Republican.

Still, when Romney came calling, she interrupted a vacation to be interviewed with the fairly unknown, newly installed chief executive, and he did not disappoint.

“I fully expected there would be a couple other people in the room, not just the two of us,” Edmonds said of their one-on-one first meeting. “He’d been well-briefed on my background and knew more than I would have expected. And he seemed to respect the work and the people with whom I’d worked. He had a very gentle quality that was very attractive. And he struck me as having a lot of humanity and as being a regular guy.”

Cabinet meetings were upbeat, collegial, and an open exchange of ideas, Edmonds said. And she was able to advance issues she believed in so long as she justified their relevance.

That experience left her with an abiding belief in Romney as “a magnificent human being.”

“When I walked into the job I walked in with my eyes open and wondering what kind of environment it would be,” she said. “Four years later I came out of the statehouse doors on a real high, truly feeling that I had been able to accomplish something, and that the people who worked with me had the opportunity to use the best ideas they could to make the state better. And I attribute that to the governor.”

Though a Republican with a business background, Romney wasn’t well-known in the state’s business community. Still, business leaders inherently trusted Romney to tackle the state’s $3 billion deficit.

The supposed business-friendly governor rewarded that trust by shepherding through a combination of spending cuts, new fees (read: taxes) and closing corporate tax loopholes that erased the shortfall.

“He was not always close to our organization,” said Gilmore, whose group represents 7,600 businesses in the state. “We agreed to disagree and that was it. We had no support against (Romney’s budget plans) in the legislature, so we had to put up and like it.”

Romney had less contentious successes using bipartisanship to deliver his hallmark near-universal healthcare plan, and saving two prominent military bases from the chopping block. Both were accomplished by partnering with liberal Democrat U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, a former political foe.

“Rather than play the politics that happens in a lot of states, he and Kennedy put their partisan differences aside and worked very collaboratively,” said Christopher Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a supporter of Romney’s presidential campaign.

Romney and Kennedy — who’d faced off in a spiteful senatorial race in 1994 — made regular trips together to the Pentagon and State Department years before other states began advocating for their bases, Anderson said.

The joint effort secured the continued status of the facilities that account for 33,000 jobs and $3 billion of business in the state annually, he added.

Such adept political diplomacy and foresight would serve Romney well in addressing federal budget issues in Washington’s treacherous political waters, Anderson argued.

“Right now we have government systems that have successfully weathered attempts to change them in the past,” said Anderson, who Romney also appointed to the state Board of Education. “He’s demonstrated in Massachusetts the ability to frame in a nonpartisan way, based on the substance of a challenge, where the change needs to be made without making it political.”

And contrary to Democratic efforts to paint Romney as an uncaring tycoon, Edmonds, Romney’s former liberal cabinet member, said he’d bring the same compassion to the Oval Office she saw on display in Massachusetts.

“I’m pained when I see him come across in the way he is now,” she said, referring to the common caricature that existed before Romney sailed to a presidential debate victory last week.

“I have a hard time figuring it out,” Edmonds said.

“I go back to the time I worked with him and I know I know this guy. He truly thinks he can help all people in this country.”

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